Absolute Power Etc Etc

Mao Zedong – Jonathan Spence

This short biography by Yale sinologist Jonathan Spence is based on solid documentation. Without claiming to make any shattering revelations – though the information about Mao’s experience as father and the children he lost was new and startling to me - the author tells the life of the Chinese leader without getting lost in the details of the never ending emergency that was life in 20^th century China. Only a third of the book deals with the exercise of power after the Communist take-over of China in 1949. Should we wish for more about the Mao of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, we’ll have to go to, say, Mao: The Unknown Story by Jung Chang.

Born in 1893 into a relatively well-off peasant family in Hunan, his father insisted that he get some education to become literate and numerate so he could bring business skills to the family concerns. He grew up to be an impressive man, a born teacher and businessman. Tall and handsome, he had boundless energy and inflexible will. He had stellar communication skills to do research and interview, organize information clearly, write reports and journalism, and present with effective public speaking skills.

He was an organizer, though rather slow to assert himself at the beginning of the Marxist movement.  He lacked the grounding in ‘theory’ that a successful Communist politician needs to get ahead. Chen Boda assisted on manipulating the gobbledygook of, say, dialectical materialism and contradictions for articles and speeches. In the early 1990s, Professor Benjamin Schwartz of Harvard, who read everything Mao wrote, wondered if Mao’s thought “had any autonomous inertial weight of its own…” apart from “the menacing and bullying tone of his sarcasm directed against individuals and groups.”

Mao played only on the sidelines at the founding of the CCP in July 1921 and was not in fact at the center of things at the beginning of the Long March. He found success from his rapid rejection of the Soviet line of union with the Guomindang and of fomenting urban and workers' revolution. He argued for a split with Chiang Kai Chek, military engagement against the occupying Japanese and the peasant revolution.

His strategy was successful, but power went to Mao’s head in the Yan’an Caves in 1936.  Spence observes, “He seemed less flexible and more determined to make all those around him conform to his own whims and beliefs. From living the simple life because he had to, Mao had moved to choosing to live the simple life, thence to boasting about living the simple life and now forcing others to live the simple life.”  Increasingly rigid, he forgot the fascination he felt in his youth for the civilized aspects of Chinese civilization which he used to love in traditional Chinese novels. We get flashes of humor in his famous interview with Edgar Snow for the classic history Red Star Over China. But after Yan’an, he seems utterly devoid of humor.

And totally unconcerned with the cost of bloody policies.

In the Land Reform Movement after 1949, Zhou Enlai estimated 830,000 landlords and gentry had been killed while Mao himself estimated as many as 2 to 3 million were killed. The Great Leap Forward and the resulting Great Chinese Famine resulted in between 15 and 55 million deaths, depending on the grim methodology of counting. The Great Cultural Revolution of the middle 1960s killed about 2 million people. Needless to say, these are all non-topics in the People’s Paradise.

I’d recommend this short biography to general readers or graduate students who need a quick overview. Not a specialist, I noticed only one head-scratcher: the claim that’s there’s no definitive history of the Chinese civil war of 1945-49. What’s Suzanne Pepper’s 1978 scholarly history – chopped liver?